| HOME : TODAY IN JOURNALISM : OFF THE NEWS : GETTING THE FULL PICTURE |
|
|
Posted Jan. 14, 2000 Getting the Full Picture
When CBS's Dan Rather stood in front of Time Square on New Year's Eve to ring in the new century, viewers apparently didn't get the whole picture. What they saw was the CBS logo on a building digitally imposed over the NBC logo. What was wrong with that picture? Poynter's Jill Geisler and Al Tompkins answer the ethical questions and suggest ways TV news stations can protect themselves in the future.
Commentary
by JILL GEISLER IT SEEMS LIKE SUCH A SIMPLE THING that journalists are supposed to do: Tell the truth. Visual journalists are expected to do even more: they have to show and tell the truth. The latest technology can help accomplish that. It can also hurt, as CBS showed us two weeks ago when it presented perhaps the first trompe l'oeil newscast on New Year's Eve. Trompe l'oeil (deceiving the eye) is supposed to be a genre of imaginative art, not a news category. When Dan Rather delivered the CBS Evening News with Times Square as a backdrop, viewers had every reason to regard what they saw as -- and for all most viewers knew, it was -- a dead-on true view of that extraordinary piece of real estate. But the view was fraudulent. Unwilling and perhaps embarrassed to acknowledge that its rival NBC had invested in displaying its logo on a Jumbotron that looms large over the square, CBS made it go away. It took new digital technology and erased the truth. Lie Number One: CBS made the NBC logo disappear, at least to viewers of the CBS Evening News. Lie Number Two: Unsatisfied with merely obliterating the name of the competitor, it replaced it with its own. Using digital magic, CBS led viewers to believe that CBS, not NBC, had used its resources to pay for a big ol' billboard in the Big Apple. What viewers see should be an accurate view of what happens. Is it any wonder that an early, legendary CBS News program was called "See It Now" or that subsequent local newscasts would call themselves "Eyewitness News?" The titles reinforce the contract with viewers: We will show you a picture of the world, or your community, as it happened and as it really is. When satellite and microwave technology landed in TV newsrooms, broadcasters basked in their ability to take viewers -- LIVE -- to see news in progress. The rules of that engagement were very clear. Back then, the Federal Communications Commission spelled them out. Don't say you are live if you are on tape. The mandate was simple: Tell the truth. It is understandable that CBS News would not want to position its human icon, Dan Rather, in front of the advertising logo of NBC. But it had other options, old fashioned, perhaps, but truthful:
I'm reminded of an episode of the old Mary Tyler Moore show. The scene is Ted Baxter's office. Ted's wall is lined with photographs of Ted and various world leaders. A visitor touches one of the pictures. Suddenly, the face of the dignitary falls off the picture, leaving Ted alone in the real photo. Ted, in an effort to impress, had cut and pasted his own virtual reality. CBS News did
the same thing to Dan Rather. The network
mocked
up a world for him, to make it a more impressive environment. But
at the same time, CBS made a mockery of the simple rule of visual
journalism: Show and tell the truth.
Commentary
by AL TOMPKINS CBS deceived its viewers. The deception was deliberate and harmful. One might argue that what CBS did is not much different from what TV does all the time. We insert graphics behind anchors; we can even create virtual news sets in empty studios. Television news sets include fake monitors and backdrops that all, in some way, deceive the viewers. We use zoom lenses, tape editors, and special effects every day. Every light we hang, every edit we make alters the reality of how things would have happened without our presence. There is a big difference. Viewers understand those deceptions. They expect them. The viewer, at some level understands that what happens in a studio sometimes is engineered. Those deceptions cause no harm to the journalistic integrity of the news organization. But when anchors go live from the field, I believe viewers watch the coverage believing the anchor is in the field to show us the truths the journalist discovered first-hand. Being on the scene gives credibility to the anchor's words, but it cuts both ways: Being on the scene of a deception links the journalist directly to the deed. It is no wonder that public confidence in television news is eroding. A year ago, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation asked Americans how the felt about television news. Some 60% of those responding said they agreed with the statement "lately, I've become more skeptical about the accuracy of anything I hear on the news." In the past, it was CBS that held firm to some important production ethics. CBS was the last network to allow cutaway pictures to cover edits in interviews. The central issue was whether the viewer understood an interview had been edited, not whether the viewer would see a jump cut. This one technique became the punch line of the Holly Hunter/John Hurt movie Broadcast News. CBS has held firmly against using production techniques such as adding music and sound in news stories with the understanding that viewers would be fooled or manipulated by the music. CBS was right to hold on to those old ideas of editorial and visual honesty. It makes this debacle all the more difficult to defend. It is almost
universally true that mankind has developed technology faster than
we develop ethical guidelines about how to use the technology. Somewhere
in the box of the gizmo that enables stations and networks to seamlessly
insert pictures into Times Square maybe there should be a line or
two in the owner's manual that says "Caution: This gizmo may confuse
your viewers and harm your credibility. Before you use this gizmo,
users should have a full conversation about how it will be used.''
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
